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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#61

Post by enos_feedler »

peteradio wrote: post #48
ogre_codes wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could easily be both a re-org and dressing the profitability numbers prepping for a sale. The fact that its mostly management is encouraging though.

I really hope they don't get acquired by one of the big cloud providers.

I dont think an existing cloud provider makes sense since they’ve all ramped their efforts pretty hard to compete with each other. I would suspect AAPL would be the buyer. It is a big risk for all iOS apps to be backed by infrastructure belonging to other companies they compete with in consumer devices. I think AAPL would want to make another option available.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#62

Post by erikrothoff »

We just switched to DO thanks to their Hatch program. The support they have shown and the energy we’ve been getting from the people at DO has been next-to-none. Obviously it’s concerning to see people being laid off, and my thoughts and concerns go to those who are facing what is probably their worst days. Based on the stated reasoning from corporate I can’t say anything other than I believe them. They have been releasing so many great things recently, and looking at the number of open-source projects on Github it seems that the proof of a flat organisation is in the pudding. We’re spending +1.5k USD monthly and based on their product roadmap shared with us developers I have no reason to doubt that we’ll be moving more of our infrastructure to DO soon.

We used to be on Linode and they were great too. The competition has really forced them to up their game and start innovating. The segment is vibrant and the cash is there. I’m not worried.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#63

Post by cabaalis »

lbotos wrote: post #47
cabaalis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious.. does your employment agreement not put you at very, very significant personal risk for putting information out like this? Throwaway account or not? I'm inclined to trust HN and it's community to a pretty strong degree. But forgive me for simply not seeing this as anything but controlled information release.

You think that DO sent out a shill to pretend to be a throwaway to give hackernews confidence in the DO platform? My read of this is very different than yours: Naive IC who doesn't have optics into the actual mechanization of the business trusting the CTO fully. I think this message from the CTO is a partial truth as they often are in orgs that aren't extremely internally transparent. AKA I don't think the "shilling"…

Your read is probably more practical than mine, and fits in better with a "don't assume malice" standpoint. I just know that social media (of which HN is begrudgingly a member) can very effectively be swayed.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#64

Post by pc86 »

ogre_codes wrote: post #27

I love DigitalOcean, my second favorite hosting company so this is concerning. As a recent Layoff survivor, this whole paragraph sets off alarm bells: > In that context, it’s notable that the company not only appointed a new CFO last summer, but also a CEO with prior CFO experience. It’s been a while since DigitalOcean has raised capital. According to PitchBook, DigitalOcean last raised money in 2017, an undisclosed…

Acquisition wouldn't necessarily be terrible depending on who acquired them. Obviously if it's a direct competitor that's bad news, but there are some markets where adding a hosting provider could be a benefit.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#65

Post by davnicwil »

chadlavi wrote: post #41
wgerard wrote: post #2

This sucks. I really want DO to succeed because I love their offerings - whereas I occasionally feel like I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerings (even EC2), DO seemed to just work. That being said, and I can’t put my finger on why necessarily, it sometimes feels a bit like Heroku - the thing you use before you “graduate” to just using one of the major cloud providers.

I feel like that "this is not serious enough" feeling is an ironic result of the fact that they have such good UX.

Not sure if it's applicable in this case as I'm not a DO user, but this is definitely a thing. For instance, think about web forms for anything 'official' - it's almost as if the worse the UX is, the older the tech it seems to be built on even, the more legit it seems. It's a really counter intuitive effect.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#66

Post by esaym »

Weird, when I go to the link, the page immediately redirects to https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=1.....

Even if I try to just go to techcrunch.com/, same thing. I only notice this because *advertising.com is in my host file on my router so instead of redirecting, I just get a "server not found" error page in firefox.

If I open a private tab, techcrunch.com loads fine. Looking at the network tab in the dev console when trying to load techcrunch.com seems to show that no redirect is made, just that techcrunch.com automatically becomes guce.advertising.com... Have I been pawnd?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#67

Post by 867-5309 »

Meekro wrote: post #54

Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…

> That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave broken programs running that chew through this precious resource for no reason. If you throttle them, they'll complain.

they are heavily throttled on disk I/O, so much so that I had to switch to AWS and pay per I/O for one project.

also the network seems throttled to 100Mbps up/down, and a few TB/mo, something which Scaleway for $3/mo is unlimited TB/mo and at certain times 2.5Gb/s

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#68

Post by esdott »

wastedhours wrote: post #39
ogre_codes wrote: post #27

I love DigitalOcean, my second favorite hosting company so this is concerning. As a recent Layoff survivor, this whole paragraph sets off alarm bells: > In that context, it’s notable that the company not only appointed a new CFO last summer, but also a CEO with prior CFO experience. It’s been a while since DigitalOcean has raised capital. According to PitchBook, DigitalOcean last raised money in 2017, an undisclosed…

Might there be an opening bell in their future... almost entirely likely.

This exactly. I’m too tired to do some basic googling for citations but anecdotally speaking, I believe hiring financial oriented leadership like this and trimming the organization of “perceived” fat (management) is right out of the going public playbook.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#69

Post by ludamad »

davnicwil wrote: post #65
chadlavi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that "this is not serious enough" feeling is an ironic result of the fact that they have such good UX.

Not sure if it's applicable in this case as I'm not a DO user, but this is definitely a thing. For instance, think about web forms for anything 'official' - it's almost as if the worse the UX is, the older the tech it seems to be built on even, the more legit it seems. It's a really counter intuitive effect.

Then you find out about some guy in Japan accessing the web form via fax. What people don't often talk about old stuff is the long tail ecosystems compatible with it

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#70

Post by pseudosavant »

chadlavi wrote: post #41
wgerard wrote: post #2

This sucks. I really want DO to succeed because I love their offerings - whereas I occasionally feel like I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerings (even EC2), DO seemed to just work. That being said, and I can’t put my finger on why necessarily, it sometimes feels a bit like Heroku - the thing you use before you “graduate” to just using one of the major cloud providers.

I feel like that "this is not serious enough" feeling is an ironic result of the fact that they have such good UX.

That and the $5/month price. I recently switched thinking I was downgrading but saving money, but I've liked DO more than using AWS, Azure, or GCP. Performance/$ is better, UX is better, and they have great support docs for so many core use cases (setup letsencrypt, run multiple hosts using nginx, setting up a VPN, etc).

There is a difference between being cheap and inexpensive. DO is inexpensive, but high quality.

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